


Strexy Corper Cupcakes

by LittleMissLiesmith



Series: The Better The Lives We Lead [10]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Baking, Cupcakes, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Schenanigans, Strex Family High School Au, christmas gifts, those two idiots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-01 02:09:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2755625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleMissLiesmith/pseuds/LittleMissLiesmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Luciano would stop with the prank war, everyone would thank him. <i>Especially</i> one Christopher Rose, also known as the one who has to write up all this.</p><p>WILL ALSO BE EDITED BY JULY TO FIT NEW CANON AND REPLACE ISADORO WITH IZZY. ISADORO NO LONGER EXISTS. WE DONT TALK ABOUT HIM.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strexy Corper Cupcakes

**Author's Note:**

> For terezdipyrope as part of the Christmas gift rounds! Request was for Luc and Sergio shenanigans. I figured this idea, which had been floating in my head for a while, fit the bill.
> 
> Directly inspired by the excellent _Phil Coulson Does Not Bake (and the Avengers Do Not Shop At IKEA Anymore)_ by scifigrl47, which any Marvel or Avengers fan should most definitely read. All of their work is fabulous.
> 
> Terez—You’re a fabulous person, there’s no need to call me anything special, I’m just a strawberry nerdlord and your messages and requests seriously make my day. Thank you for always being there.

Christopher Rose had to put up with a lot from the extended Vega family, especially given that that designation included Ricardo, Luciano, and a dozen-odd high schoolers.

But he had always thought Sergio Vega was above that.

“Please explain,” he said, dropping a stack of papers onto the desk of the man in question. Luciano Silva, sitting on one of the lab desks, took one look at it and made a noise that sounded like _meep_.

Sergio looked down. “Are those…”

“Ads and complaints? Yes.”

“For…”

“A fake product you made up to prank Carlos Mendez with which various people in Night Vale Town have been harassing supermarket owners and bakers about for the past two weeks? Yes.”

“And you’re…”

“Highly displeased bordering on fucking pissed? Yes. _Luciano Silva, if you leave this room then tomorrow your hands are going to become Stella’s pizza topping and I will eat them and laugh._ ”

Luciano meeped again and sat back down.

Christopher looked right at Sergio. “And please explain. Use drunk-person words. Not drunk-Isadoro words, he’s more eloquent than he is sober, normal drunk-person words. Drunk Cecil Palmer words.”

“I don’t have words a drunk Cecil Palmer could understand,” Sergio said after a moment. “I could draw you a picture.”

“Just…explain,” Christopher muttered, already regretting telling Stella that he would handle it.

“Okay.” Sergio rifled through the papers. “You know about the prank war.”

“I dare you to find me the one person in the tristate area who _doesn’t_ know about that goddamn prank war. _Do not_ take that literally. Go on.”

“And how Luc will, on occasion, stretch the truth regarding the existence of certain goods and services?”

“You mean like how you’ll lie to his face using jingles? And boxes? And you’ll recruit students to tell him about this stuff, with said jingles and boxes, and try to convince him that it exists? Yes. I noticed. And I told you two to stop doing that.”

“Christopher—“

“No, really, I don’t see why you think gaslighting a high schooler is acceptable behavior from the thirtysomething science professor and the music teacher—“

“It’s a _joke_ ,” Luciano piped up, giggling nervously.

“Clearly it isn’t anymore, but carry on. You were telling me all about how you deliberately lie to and send on a while goose chase a mostly-innocent seventeen-year-old whose boyfriends will undoubtedly hear about the products and want them and he cannot refuse them and _you know that_.”

Sergio and Luciano looked at each other. “Well, when you put it that way, it just sounds like a bad idea,” Luciano said after a minute.

“Yes. It does. Because it is. It is a _horrible_ idea, Carlos Mendez is completely innocent aside from a penchant for mischief, and you two are dicks.”

“I’ll let that horrendous slur on my character pass,” Sergio muttered, “but you should know that I’m deeply wounded.”

“Good. It’s been noted. Keep explaining.”

“Okay.” Sergio took a deep breath and began speaking in the extraordinarily fast way that he only did when he and Luc had really fucked with the media, the local government, or the human mind. “Well, jingles and boxes weren’t working anymore, we would send out some of the students to go talk to Carlos and he would just laugh and say he knew it was a fake, so we knew we had to do something rather…drastic.”

“Oh, god,” Christopher muttered, reaching for the aspirin. 

“So I withdrew some money from the family’s account, came up with a fake line of baking products, hired a small advertising firma and had them mock up a full campaign, television, radio, print, the works, there was a billboard, I bought ad time around six, and now there’s some consumer demand and people are complaining,” Sergio said all in one breath.

Christopher stared at them for a minute, then unscrewed the cap on the aspirin and dumped two into his palm, dry-swallowing them without so much as blinking. “You created consumer demand.”

“Yes.”

“For a product that doesn’t actually exist.”

“Yes.”

“So that you could prank Carlos Mendez.”

“Yes.”

“You two are lucky he didn’t file a _restraining order_! You two are lucky that citizen’s complaints is the worst of what’s going on, are you out of your mind?!” Christopher shrieked.

“Look, it was not the most thought-through plan in the world, we mostly just wanted it to work!” Sergio shot back as Luciano started laughing hysterically.

“I do not these people—“ He gestured to the stack of complaints. “In the slightest for being furious with you, I especially do not blame Ricardo for telling me to come down in and handle you two, you practically caused a riot—“

“But that’s not why Ricardo’s mad,” Luciano giggled.

Christopher stopped short. “What.”

“That’s not why Ricardo’s mad.”

Christopher eyed the aspirin bottle and tossed it aside, opening Sergio’s bottom drawer, where he knew he kept everything he didn’t want people to find. Vodka it was. “Then explain to me why everyone is mad.”

Luciano kept giggling hysterically. “Because they don’t exist and people who have heard about it have been going to shopkeepers all week and the Headmaster went down to the corner market and asked for Strexy Corper baking products and the counter girl started sobbing because apparently her entire week has been nothing but people asking for Strexy Corper baking products except they don’t exist because we made them up to prank Carlos Mendez and he figured that out somewhere between getting the tissues and patting her back and he-was-very-mad.”

Christopher blinked at him and opened the bottle of vodka, picking a glass up off of the counter and pouring in the drink. “You are a punishment for something awful I did in another life,” he said flatly, “but that explains Ricardo’s orders.”

“Which were?” Sergio asked apprehensively.

“That you two are under probation and won’t get your paychecks until you make Strexy Corper baking products a reality.” He drained the glass, grabbed the bottle again, and turned for the door. “I’m taking the vodka,” he said in a tone that brokered no argument.

Sergio nodded meekly.

-O-

“I…am not entirely certain what I ought think about this,” Isadoro said as he entered the kitchens to find Sergio and Luciano in lab coats and aprons, Stella Vega sitting cross-legged on the counter with a cookie in her mouth, curls perfectly coiffed, and a dusting of flour on her nose. The entire room was covered in flour, sugar, blueprints for cooking implements, three yellow notebooks filled with Stella’s neat cursive, and a copious amount of jam spilling out of glass jars with neat “STREXY CORPER BAKING CO” labels. “Was there not a rule regarding the forbidding of scientific endeavors where consumables are being prepared?” 

“We’re baking,” Luciano said, holding up a bowl of batter. His braid was half-undone, his glasses smudged with cookie dough, and he looked ghostly with the layer of flour covering his skin and hair. 

Stella nodded and pulled the cookie out of her mouth, chewing the bite she had and grinning. “I’m Strexy Corper!” she chirped. “Let’s bake some happy, come on!”

“You’re creepy,” Isadoro said flatly. 

“How was it?” Sergio asked Stella.

She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Needs more sweetness. It’s too spicy.”

“Spicy. In a cookie?” Isadoro asked.

Sergio nodded. “Ginger snaps to start.”

“…is there a reason for this at all?”

Sergio sighed. “Luciano and I may or may not have caused consumer demand for a product which does not strictly speaking exist. Namely, the Strexy Corper line of baking products. And Ricardo-is-very-mad.”

Isadoro just looked at him, then over at Luc, then sighed and grabbed an apron. “Might I assist you?”

“’Course. Do you even know how to bake?”

“Indeed.”

“Since when do Latin scholar prostitutes know how to bake?” Stella asked in confusion. 

“Since they took lessons.” He tied the apron deftly and grabbed a wooden spoon and bowl of dough, looking at the chalkboard covered in equations and in one corner an ingredient list. “Have you considered a little caramel?”

Luciano tapped his chin thoughtfully. “Caramel,” he said slowly. “In ginger snaps?”

“Let’s try it,” Isadoro urged. “Or honey, perhaps.”

Sergio shrugged. “Can’t be worse than what we’ve already got. Let’s go.”

“You can’t sell this recipe commercially,” Stella announced suddenly, looking at the chalkboard.

Luciano made a notation and shoved the chalk into the holder, grabbing an oven mitt and opening the door. “Compromise later, bake now. We have made cookies and they are going to be delicious.”

-O-

Stella bit into the next cookie, eyes widening as the crust broke. “That’s…good,” she said in mild surprise. “Better than the last ones. Caramel, who would have guessed?”

Isadoro had an insufferably smug grin on his face as he opened the nearest refrigerator and rummaged around for the milk. “I shan’t say I told you so, but I told you so.”

“Yes, you were right,” Luciano muttered, bumping the Latin teacher with his shoulder. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

“You’re certainly one to talk!”

Before it could get into a full-fledged argument, Sergio tossed each of them a cookie from the tray. “Ninety seconds to cool properly,” he announced. “And then they are perfectly ready to be packaged.”

Isadoro poured a glass of milk and handed it to Luciano, forgoing the milk for his own hip flask and flashing them all a grin as he bit into the cookie. “Mm,” he said, grin disappearing to an expression of shock. “Mrs. Corper is correct. These are indeed delicious.”

“Caramel,” Luciano mused, licking the substance off his fingers. “Who would have thought?”

-O-

Isadoro had long left by the time Sergio and Luciano came back from lunch break to find a ransacked kitchen and no cookies. The science teacher turned one of the empty metal trays upside down as if he would find the missing cookies underneath and raised his eyebrows. “Stella, dearest?”

He heard a gulp. “Not here,” came her voice from behind the refrigerator. 

Sergio moved the door aside and looked at Stella. “That was six dozen cookies,” he said flatly. “You did not eat six dozen cookies. That is a fatal overdose of cookie.”

“Is there such thing as a fatal overdose of cookie?” Luciano asked in interest. 

“There should be. So she can do so.” Sergio looked around. “Who helped you?”

“The English department.”

“Traitor!” came a five-voice chorus from under the table.

Luciano lifted up the edge of the cloth draped overtop to reveal Isadoro, Walter, Sereno, Miss, and Saoirse all crammed underneath the metal piece of furniture and all looking very, very exceedingly full. Isadoro looked nearly sick. “How many cookies did you have?” he asked the Latin teacher.

“He didn’ even have all of his. I had most of ‘em,” Walter said in amusement. 

Sergio pressed a hand to his forehead. “You ate all of the cookies.”

“They’re good cookies,” Saoirse said, trying desperately to look cool while jammed underneath a table against Walter and her girlfriend. “Just eat a whole bunch and drink Isadoro’s peppermint schnapps—“

“Wait, what?”

“And death by delicious.”

“That’s a good slogan,” Stella said, peering under. 

“Most people prefer not to have death mentioned when they’re eating cookies,” Sereno said. “It’s kind of a thing.”

“Most people lead very boring lives. That’s not a problem we have.”

“We can’t market cookies with alcohol.”

“Says who?”

“Says the world.” Sereno grabbed a neatly labeled box and shook it, clearly looking for more cookies. “You can make more, right?”

-O-

“Strexy Corper baking products will be on the shelves of local stores and specialty markets within the month,” Sergio said when he and Luc entered Ricardo’s office. “I did not much want to wait with my paycheck at stake.”

Ricardo looked at the box of cookies Sergio dropped on his desk. “…I didn’t actually expect you to do it,” he admitted.

“Well, we did. Hope you enjoy, because the English department certainly did.”

Ricardo’s eyes lit up. “What did they do this time?”

“Ate all of the cookies,” Luciano piped up. “Five dozen cookies.”

“That’s a fatal overdose of cookie,” Ricardo said flatly.

Sergio snapped his fingers. “I knew I got it from somewhere!”


End file.
